Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

---

[163] flowed so much more smoothly? It was Lowell who had accepted literature as his sphere, while Holmes regarded it as a mere avocation; yet it was Lowell who never quite attained smoothness or finish of utterance, while Holmes easily developed it. Lowell was always liable to entanglement in his own wealth of thought and fancy. His style is rich and often delightful; yet it must be said both of his prose and his verse, that his immense fertility of mind constantly led him into confused rhetoric and mixed metaphors. He lacked, in short, the pure taste and tireless “capacity for taking pains” which belong to the literary artist.

The permanence of his verse is especially imperiled by this defect. Brilliant and spontaneous as it is, very little of it possesses the absolute quality of good poetry. His form does not grow inevitably out of his theme, and consequently his style is what a great style never is, the “dress” of his thought. While, therefore, he composed more impulsively and rapidly than Holmes, he never produced a strain quite so pure and perfect and certain of a place in the treasury of English poetry as The Chambered Nautilus. He